Published: Saturday, April 6, 2013 at 1:00 p.m.

Last Modified: Saturday, April 6, 2013 at 2:44 a.m.

A close look at this year's N.C. Azalea Festival poster reveals traces of earlier festival artworks.

At the center of the flower is part of the festival's logo. Somewhere in the flower is an upside-down belle, and there's also a tiny cadet somewhere.

“I keep finding things in there,” said Elizabeth Singletary, the artist who created the collage selected as this year's Official Artwork.

A blueberry is visible in the butterfly's eye. The butterfly is an Eastern tiger swallowtail, which last year was adopted as the Official State Butterfly after vigorous lobbying by the Cape Fear Garden Club.

Singletary's living room is littered with works of colorful birds and nature scenes done in an impressionistic style.

“I like art that elevates your mood,” she said. “It doesn't have any deep meaning. I use bright colors because they make people happier.”

Singletary works out of the same home studio once used by artist Mary Cameron Hoey. It's filled with magazines. Her friends drop them off in stacks.

She demonstrated her technique as we chatted. She rips tiny colorful shapes from the magazines and glues them onto a piece of canvas, using a small paintbrush to apply the glue under and atop the paper strips.

She certainly knows her medium.

“I get lots of blues from Coastal Living,” she said.

Our State provides earth tones, she said. Architectural Digest is good for textures.

When she started creating the Azalea Festival artwork, she incorporated past programs into the work. She said she had Azalea Festival staffers rooting around the offices for more copies.

Singletary is also a professional calligrapher. She does wedding invitations, and works for movie studios. For the Civil War-era movie “The Conspirator,” she designed seven historic handwriting styles.

“They'd say, ‘I need a letter written in No. 3,' ” she said.

She whipped up a “mad scientist's journal” for “Revolution” and a handwritten cherry pie recipe for “Safe Haven.”

Singletary, 43, and mom to a ninth-grade son, majored in social work and once worked with homeless women and children in Seattle.

A native of Johnson City, Tenn., she moved to Wilmington in 1999. She's now office manager for the Successful Parenting Institute.

A couple of years ago she decided she wanted to return to art, an old hobby.

Her son gave her lessons from then-local artist Deborah Cavanaugh.

“You like paper. I think you'd like collage,” she recalls Cavanaugh as saying. “She put on Fleetwood Mac and said, ‘Start ripping and gluing,' ”

Cavanaugh, herself the Azalea Festival's official artist in 2000 and 2001, gave Singletary the affirmation she needed to hear.

“There are lots of folks who sort of yearn for a more artistic life but don't know how to get to it,” said Cavanaugh, who now lives in Washington, D.C. “Her work is very beautiful, and she kept at it.”

Singletary's art career got a boost last year when her work was featured in the gallery of public radio station WHQR. She sold all the works displayed.

She enjoys creating works for charity auctions and causes.

“What happened to me is like that butterfly,” Singletary said of the swallowtail in the Azalea Festival poster. “I feel like I'm transformed.”

Column idea? Contact Si Cantwell at 343-2364 or Si.Cantwell@StarNewsOnline.com, or follow him on Twitter: @SiCantwell.

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